


Part Of The Furniture

by SilverMiko



Series: Sight Unseen [4]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, Jim from IT, Romance, Slow Burn, The Great Game compliant, and almost maybe sort of admits he was worried, sherlock almost feels bad about upsetting Molly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-14
Updated: 2017-02-14
Packaged: 2018-09-24 05:34:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9705545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverMiko/pseuds/SilverMiko
Summary: They moved in and out of each other’s daily lives and were in and out each other’s flats enough that it never seemed questionable. He was just part of the furniture, she was part of his.





	

It had started in 1989, with Carl Powers. Further proof that Scotland Yard, frankly, were completely out of their depth in the face of a true challenge no matter the decade. That was when he’d gotten his first taste of The Game. But, according to his parents and Mycroft, he had to actually finish school (boring) and go through those perfunctory motions before receiving the freedom to do as he pleased.  
And it had been boring, so many boring years and collecting newspaper scraps; jotting observations down in a moleskine journal which would the first iteration of “The Science of Deduction.” Without a proper outlet, he turned to a more cliched avenue: drugs. Small scale at first; cigarettes, pot, ritalin. Experimenting, finding the right combination to be a proper distraction without making him too dull. It had served him well, until it had not. He’d gone to uni, trying out different majors and somehow earned his undergrad degree in Chemistry while attending class perhaps two times in total.  
At twenty-one, he moved to Shoreditch on the pretense of getting his Master’s. And then, as Mycroft said, it went downhill from there. That was when the First Incident occurred, upping the percentage too much until he created a “scene” and found himself in an Austrian rehab center. At twenty-four, he found himself dropped in Scotland with the orders of finishing the schooling Mummy and Daddy thought they were paying for.  
And that’s when he met her: Molly Hooper.  
He had assumed from the moment she threw her coffee on him that she’d be a long list of people that came and went, deleted. But she wasn’t. She persevered somehow. Of course, it helped she wasn’t as stupid as everyone else, that she clearly didn’t care to faff with her appearance when there was work to be done, and somehow she had managed a whole spring term as his lab partner without quitting or threatening his life.  
She was efficient and she didn’t annoy him. Perhaps it had been why he was able to work with her professional now. He could overlook her bad jokes and small talk, areas where they agreed to disagree on whether were things she had a talent for. Mostly she was there, he had been there, and stayed there, though he had to admit sometimes he wondered if any day now she’d finally be done with him.  
He knew he was difficult sometimes, John told him as much.  
He supposed it was curiosity and a years-old sense of gratitude. He still had no idea why he had called in that favor, got her home in time to see her dying father. There was nothing to be gained, and it meant owing Mycroft. But when he had heard the phone hit the floor and saw her crumble, something in him turned uncomfortably and it was no different than solving a puzzle. He certainly never expected she’d choose to repay him with a kiss. Perhaps something about that pub, it always seemed to be the scene of the crime.  
They never spoke of it. He had always chalked it up to a chemical reaction, hormones and all the like making a confusing mix in her. She was only human, after all. Almost like all the other ones, but somehow singularly and uniquely...Molly.  
She had once suggested he consider solving crime as a career, before she let her emotions prompt that unexpected response. While he still kept his journal and made his deductions from the comfort of his armchair, he had never thought to actually grace Scotland Yard with his brilliance. He felt it’d be too tedious to bear. Maybe he could be a private investigator, as much the title made his chafe.  
And then that day happened. He’d gone too far, too deep into a high. Mycroft had found him, and Molly had saved him. For some reason she wanted the fact obscured by after that and given the choice between solving crime and Switzerland, he took solving crime. He’d been lucky that Molly was pursuing her specialist registrar level at St. Bart’s, where he could pull strings. Naturally, he’d work with no but her. She understood, they knew how to coordinate around and with each other in the lab. The science had always been their common tongue.  
At first, they only interacted at the hospital. And then he started showing up at her Borough flat, prompted by some discovery or thought. When she’d ask why it couldn’t wait, he’d just say, “What else do you have to do right now?”  
Apparently, the ‘right’ thing to have said would be, “isn’t this more interesting to be doing?” But after enough time he’d wanted to give her some credit that she understood without extra context. But sometimes he did wonder.  
When he’d settled into Baker Street, he started asking her to bring spare parts. Sometimes she’d stay for tea. At first Mrs. Hudson thought she was a “girlfriend”, a notion he quickly corrected. They were colleagues, scientists above all who valued logic or reason. Well, him more coldly so than her. She was logical, practical, but...warm.  
They moved in and out of each other’s daily lives and were in and out each other’s flats enough that it never seemed questionable. He was just part of the furniture, she was part of his. It required not much deeper reasoning than that, but he was sure Mrs. Hudson read into it too much sometimes. The better food was by her flat though, and sometimes when he felt his Vitamin D levels go too low, he’d figure it was a good excuse to confer with her over casework and cheese toasties. Might as well kill two birds with one stone.  
Then John came along, and the dynamic shifted as with any new variable that comes into play. She came to Baker Street less, she worked more. But then she had worked hard to get where she was and he knew it. Molly Hooper was a constant variable.  
He knew she’d advanced as much she had and would keep going to Consultant if she chose.  
Consulting Doctor and Consulting Detective. Funny that.  
And Molly had remained a constant until the time that shifted, the time she edged towards telling him off in the lab after what he deduced about Jim From IT. She hadn’t told him off in years. He supposed he had that coming, he always did when it came to her. Perhaps it’s why he paid her the high compliment of giving a “please” with thing and the occasional “sorry”. Whether she understood the rarity of those small gifts, he couldn’t be sure of and they were it was such a small gesture not worth ruminating on too hard.  
But then she had been mad at him, and he wondered if he’d finally gone too far with deducing her and those attached to her. Well up until that business at the pool where Jim! Jim From It?! Turned out to be Moriarty.  
Molly Hooper had been dating Jim Moriarty and lived to tell the tale. Except for the tiny fact she had no clue. She would in a moment though, and that’s entirely why he was outside her front door. Not that he was worried. Not that he’d thought up at least twelve scenarios where Molly was in peril.  
He rang, she answered. She looked upset.  
“What do you want, Sherlock?”  
No ‘hi’ like normal. This was chem lab Molly, the Molly he hadn’t dealt with in a long time, but muscle memory didn’t forget.  
“It’s about Jim.”  
“Oh?” she said with a snort, raising an eyebrow, “Come to apologize then?”  
He pursed his lips, look to the side for a moment.  
“Noooo?”  
“Well what then? Because I haven’t heard from him after we fought, no thanks to you, and I’ve been worried.”  
“About that, you see you were right. He’s not gay. Well, he might be. Maybe both ways.”  
“Sherlock!” she said. Definitely cross.  
“Oh for heaven’s sake, Moriarty! Jim is Moriarty!”  
Her face froze, her mouth working open and a bubble of nervous laughter came out.  
“You’re joking? Jim is Moriarty? No...but...you really don’t joke, do you?” she said, her voice growing small.  
And there it was, the shock. He let himself in through the doorway, shut the door, and began making tea. When all else failed, tea was the solution.  
After a few minutes he had her sitting on the sofa and a cup in her hand.  
“Moriarty! I was dating Moriarty? Oh my god, I snogged Moriarty!”  
“And impressively made it out unscathed. His act must have been a good one. Even had me fooled.”  
“And Toby liked him! That traitorous little feline!”  
“Come now, he likes me too.” Sherlock said, as the cat in question pounced up from the floor into Sherlock’s lap and Sherlock looked at Molly as if to say, “see?”  
Molly put her face in her hands.  
“Oh my goooddddddd. We watched “Glee.”  
“You did what?”  
“Glee, Sherlock. You know high school glee club, lots of Journey, no of course you don’t but Jim swore he loved it.”  
“Is this some telly show?”  
She made a loud groan.  
“Why me?”  
“Well it makes perfect sense. I spend so much time in the morgue and we’re colleagues and have been colleagues for years and you’re essentially the one with the most access to the morgue and myself so it’s hardly a stretch to see why he targeted you. Early thirties, single, owner of a cat, haven’t had a relationship in…”  
“Sherlock, I wasn’t really asking why.”  
“Oh.”  
They sat in silence, drinking their tea.  
“I am glad though. That he didn’t...that you’re…”  
Somehow, the words wouldn’t form on his tongue. Was it so hard to say he was glad she was safe?  
But she gave him a small smile, and somehow she just knew.  
“Thank you. For telling me. For worrying.”  
“I...you’re welcome?”  
It seemed like the right thing to say, and his deduction about Moriarty’s reasoning made sense if one considered Moriarty’s perspective and how Molly must have appeared to that point of view. Mousy. Gullible. Accessible.  
It was fortunate that Moriarty couldn’t see past that, and that his hypothesis as she went was plausible if not flawed. What the consulting criminal hadn’t accounted for was how vital a variable Molly Hooper was. Vital in a way Sherlock Holmes still did not or wilfully refused to understand.  
At least, until Christmas.

**Author's Note:**

> This actually was not a planned part of the overall story, but I wanted to practice writing in Sherlock's narrative a bit more, and I wanted something on its own that bridged the Moriarty pool scene and the Christmas party. Someone would have had to tell Molly about Jim, maybe a consulting detective feeling a tiny bit contrite and maybe ever so slightly worried?  
> I also realized that I needed to position Sherlock to actively solving crime with a bit of better bridging as well. In Edinburgh, when Molly suggests he solve crime, he seemed to shrug it off as if he had never considered it. But he had! Carl Powers! So I had to flesh out what was essentially his gap years between that and working with Scotland Yard and better mention of why he wasn't solving crime all along. Totally not authorial oversight. None at all.  
> But mostly, I wanted to state how basically him in her flat and her in his was commonplace and something he thought wasn't particularly profound because to him it was natural-state sort of thing. This will be important later.


End file.
